Single Vs. Multi-Patterning EUV


Extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography finally is moving into production, but foundry customers now must decide whether to implement their designs using EUV-based single patterning at 7nm, or whether to wait and instead deploy EUV multiple patterning at 5nm. Each patterning scheme has unique challenges, making that decision more difficult than it might appear. Targeted for 7nm, single pattern... » read more

New Design Approaches At 7/5nm


The race to build chips with a multitude of different processing elements and memories is making it more difficult to design, verify and test these devices, particularly when AI and leading-edge manufacturing processes are involved. There are two fundamental problems. First, there are much tighter tolerances for all of the components in those designs due to proximity effects. Second, as a re... » read more

Comparative Stochastic Process Variation Bands For N7, N5, And N3 At EUV


By Alessandro Vaglio Preta, Trey Gravesa, David Blankenshipa, Kunlun Baib, Stewart Robertsona, Peter De Bisschopc, John J. Biaforea a) KLA-Tencor Corporation, Austin, TX 78759, U.S.A. b) KLA-Tencor Corporation, Milpitas, CA 95035, U.S.A. c) IMEC, Kapeldreef 75, 3000, BE ABSTRACT Stochastics effects are the ultimate limiter of optical lithography technology and are a major concern for n... » read more

Reliability Becomes The Top Concern In Automotive


Reliability is emerging as the top priority across the hottest growth markets for semiconductors, including automotive, industrial and cloud-based computing. But instead of replacing chips every two to four years, some of those devices are expected to survive for up to 20 years, even with higher usage in sometimes extreme environmental conditions. This shift in priorities has broad ramificat... » read more

Unsticking Moore’s Law


Sanjay Natarajan, corporate vice president at Applied Materials with responsibility for transistor, interconnect and memory solutions, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about variation, Moore's Law, the impact of new materials such as cobalt, and different memory architectures and approaches. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Reliability is becoming more of an... » read more

Low Power At The Edge


The tech world has come to the realization in recent months that there is far too much data to process everything in the cloud. Now it is starting to come to grips with what that really means for edge and near-edge computing. There still are no rules for where or how that data will be parsed, but there is a growing recognition that some level of pre-processing will be necessary, and that in tur... » read more

Boosting Analog Reliability


Aveek Sarkar, vice president of Synopsys’ Custom Compiler Group, talks about challenges with complex design rules, rigid design methodologies, and the gap between pre-layout and post-layout simulation at finFET nodes. https://youtu.be/JRYlYJ31LLw » read more

Tightening Margins On Heat


Stephen Crosher, CEO of Moortec, talks with Semiconductor Engineering about the impact of more accurate measurements on power, performance and reliability of designs from 40nm all the way down to 3nm. https://youtu.be/VnX-TiaMVmI » read more

What’s the Right Path For Scaling?


The growing challenges of traditional chip scaling at advanced nodes are prompting the industry to take a harder look at different options for future devices. Scaling is still on the list, with the industry laying plans for 5nm and beyond. But less conventional approaches are becoming more viable and gaining traction, as well, including advanced packaging and in-memory computing. Some option... » read more

Top Tech Talks Of 2018


2018 shaped up to be a year of transition and inflection, sometimes in the same design. There were new opportunities in automotive, continued difficulties in scaling, and an explosion in AI and machine learning everywhere. Traffic numbers on stories give a snapshot of the most current trends, but with videos those trends are even more apparent because of the time invested in watching those v... » read more

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